He and his peers were being prepared "for college and a life of honor and service." This was not a matter of choice. They were to become "men of character," although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington"s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.
He and his 971 cla.s.smates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some-like Warrington-had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tyc.o.o.ns, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his cla.s.smates-white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.
Like everybody else at Gilman, Warrington read the entire Lord of the Rings Lord of the Rings cycle, smoked ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night. cycle, smoked ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night.
But Warrington also knew he was unlike his cla.s.smates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster"s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.
The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington"s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning ch.o.r.e known as algebra II.
Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster"s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the covers and stay there for the day. But he could not. He was, after all, a Gillet.
Being a Gillet could be something of a ch.o.r.e. It seemed, on its face, quite impressive. Often people a.s.sumed he was the heir to the guy who invented the razor blade, or something like that. He was not. He was, instead, the great-stepgrandson of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. On his mother"s side were two United States senators, Millard Tydings and Joseph Tydings. His father"s father was a big war hero in World War I. His stepfather, John Schapiro, owned racetracks and lived with his mother and siblings on an enormous horse-farm estate. Warrington"s home was not just a home; it was Tally Ho Farms in Worthington Hills, four hundred acres of stark white fences and green, with the Schapiro/Gillet family horses cantering in the misty dawn. It was a lot, this image of impregnability. And what was worse? It was just that-an image.
There was a part of Warrington that was happy that he lived at the headmaster"s little apartment. He was aware that if he were, in fact, living at home like all the other kids, he"d never see his mother and stepfather anyway.
They were always away at events-fox hunting, charity parties, that sort of thing. His stepfather preferred to spend his time at his racetracks rather than at Tally Ho. Whenever Warrington ate dinner at home, he"d sit down at the table with his real sister and stepbrother and the food would be prepared and presented by servants. Mom and Dad simply weren"t part of that scene. Even calling them Mom and Dad seemed wrong. Thus Warrington had convinced himself that staying at the Gilman School was not such a bad thing. At least you didn"t have to confront the empty chairs every night at the dinner table. At least you could pretend that you didn"t really care.
"Those values did not get instilled," Warrington said. "Everybody"s busy on a highfalutin lifestyle. They"re too busy. The kids of these types of families get lost in the shuffle. The parents are too busy to sit down for three hours to do math homework . . . Rich people do not have time to run around with children, to run around to Little League and soccer and football. On the weekend, you"d go fox hunting. You were misled into thinking that you were just like everybody else."
Of course, not caring wasn"t so easy on this particular morning. The schism between the Gillet family image and the Gillet family reality had hit home hard the previous weekend. At the age of seventeen, Warrington III had met Warrington Junior for the first time in his life.
His real father had just shown up, out of the blue. He might as well have been the last emperor of China. Here he was presenting himself to his son, who was by now a junior in high school and who had not seen his father during his entire conscious existence. Kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, almost all of high school-no father. Now here he was, this stranger with the same name, blown up on the doorstep like a guy with a subpoena. Of course when Warrington saw his father for the first time in seventeen years, he knew immediately who he was. This stemmed in part from the fact that Warry Junior looked exactly like Warry III.
He was a handsome guy, this stranger, with a Kirk Doug las chin and all his hair at age forty-five. The man had perfect posture for a tall guy, and even more perfect teeth. He wore a very nice suit jacket but no tie and appeared self-confident and yet informal at once. He was charm personified. He was the prodigal dad.
Warrington couldn"t really call him Dad. He knew the man solely through washed out photographs and bitter stories told by his mother. When he was a toddler, probably two years old, his mother had discovered that Big Warry was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around as much as possible with as many women as he could track down. Warrington"s mother, herself the daughter of money and privilege, wasn"t going for that. Out the door went Big Warry, and off to Palm Beach he slithered, living la dolce vita without so much as a post-card home to his namesake or anybody else at the Tally Ho Farms that Warrington called a home.
Seeing his father out of the blue was like a shot to the chin.
Here was a guy his mother referred to as "the bon vivant playboy-about-town who never worked a legitimate day in his life." The closest his father came to actual work was at one point becoming president of the Game Conservancy USA, a nonprofit effort to support wildlife conservation and raise money for anti-poaching efforts in Tanzania. Otherwise he spent his days hanging around other people"s houses and trolling for a wealthy woman who might want to marry him. It was difficult to explain why Warrington would even give the man a second thought, but he did. His explanation would have been that he"d always wanted a father, even one who forgot about him for nearly his entire childhood.
His stepfather, John Schapiro, didn"t really count. Granted the man wasn"t abusive. In the two years after he moved into Tally Ho, he hadn"t beaten Warrington or sent him to bed without supper even. He just wasn"t what Warrington imagined a father was supposed to be. He owned racetracks and spent nearly all his time there. When he was home, he could speak pa.s.sionately about only one subject-information contained in the Racing Form Racing Form. He got Warrington-who"d begun riding at an early age-reading it by the sixth grade. There was some connection. They could talk horses, which to Warrington were about sport and to Schapiro were about money. Sometimes his stepfather would pick him up at Gilman and take him to the Pimlico Racetrack for the day. He"d let him use his allowance to place bets. He put Warrington in touch with one of his bookies to bet on the football spread. Twice he flew Warrington and his siblings out to Las Vegas and let Warry roll the dice at the c.r.a.ps table. Warry, his stepfather explained, was lucky.
"The last thing a real father would do-the last thing I would do with my child-is let him call a bookie on the telephone. But if I was married to some babe with renegade kids, you wouldn"t care about them. They"re not your kids."
For Warry, the equestrian kinship with his stepfather ended there. In all the years from middle school into high school that Warrington competed in steeplechase, he could not remember his stepfather (or his mother for that matter) showing up to cheer him on. They were elsewhere, along with his real father and any sense that he would be allowed to have a family life that involved actual family.
Yet when his real father showed up, Warrington could not simply turn away. He wanted to. It would have been justified. He could not. On this morning, he should have tried to forget the entire weekend. He was late for algebra II. Thinking about algebra II was somehow more inviting than thinking about his father"s visit. He knew he had to focus and couldn"t be distracted by familial sideshows. Every year about 10 percent of the cla.s.s would not make it to the next year, and each year Warrington wondered if he would make the cut. He"d gotten almost all the way through junior year, and figured he could stick it out to the end. But as he dressed himself for cla.s.s, he couldn"t help remembering one particularly strange moment during Dad"s sudden weekend visit to Tally Ho.
The two were alone, and Warrington suddenly realized that this guy in front of him was trying to give him advice. That was strange, given that the guy had forgotten he had a son through three presidential administrations and Wa tergate. But there it was, his father-his real father-giving Warrington advice. Was it about how to become a man of character? Did it involve a "life of honor and service"? Not quite.
"Son," he said, "never marry for beauty. Always marry for money. With money, you can always get beauty on the side."
May 20, 1978
Preakness Day at Pimlico, the biggest race in Maryland. This wasn"t your average day at the track. This wasn"t just a back alley c.r.a.p game. This wasn"t three-card monte. This was Pimlico, where the United States House of Representatives once adjourned for the only time in its history to attend a horse race. n.o.body remembered the horses-Parole, Ten Broeck and Tom Ochiltree-but everybody called that day the Great Race. And the Preakness was the Great Race on an annual basis. It was the high church of high stakes. It reeked of history, from its place as the second jewel in the Triple Crown to the tradition of painting the wrought iron horse-and-rider weather vane atop the Old Clubhouse cupola the colors of the victorious horse"s silks as soon as the race was run. On this day odds were the painter was going to be dipping into his cans of pink and black-the colors of Affirmed, a three-year-old Thoroughbred out of Harbor View farms who was favored to win.
Tradition was not on the mind of the nineteen-year-old Villanova freshman named Francis Warrington Gillet III who stood at the cashier"s window, trying to convince the guy behind the iron bars that placing a bet with a $5,000 personal check from a teenager was a perfectly normal occurrence. The guy wasn"t buying his pitch.
The clock was ticking and Warrington knew he had to do something drastic. He wanted Affirmed to win and Alydar to place, and the guy behind the window was practically laughing in his face. The guy had his suspicions. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for a kid Warrington"s age, regardless of the last name involved. Warrington was dropping every name he could think of to sway the guy, but it wasn"t working. Then he got an idea: why not take the check directly to a trustee of Pimlico his stepfather knew?
Warrington knew that being the stepson of John Schapiro might make the difference. John Schapiro was a devoted gambler. It made him feel alive. He spent most of his waking hours thinking about the next horse race, the next poker game, the next interlocution with his bookie. He knew everybody at the tracks, from the stable boys to the trustees of Pimlico.
There was only one problem with the whole scenario: Warrington knew very well that there wasn"t a thin dime in his checking account. He was betting it all on the idea that the stars in the heavens would fall into alignment just for him. He craved quick cash (who didn"t?), but he also sought that feeling of euphoria that comes when you take a chance and you"re right. He knew he wasn"t taking the biggest chance of all time. Affirmed had already won the Kentucky Derby with Alydar placing, and he was favored to do the same today. But you never knew what was going to happen when you plunked your money down at the cashier"s window. Alydar, after all, was the only horse to have actually beaten Affirmed. You were always taking a chance. And Warrington liked taking chances. Of course, it helped if you actually had some money to bet. With only a few hours to post time, he did not.
He did, however, have his stepfather"s name to drop. He went to Plan B. He managed to talk his way into the trustee"s office less than an hour before post time, and dropped Schapiro"s name as many times as he waved the check in his hand for the important man to see.
"Now, son," said the Pimlico trustee, "are you sure you have enough money to cover this?"
"No problem," said Warrington, and the deed was done.
Warrington knew that was a lie. He knew he"d crossed a line, but he was testing the difference between recklessness and confidence. He was nineteen years old. That"s what you did.
He made sure to return to the same cashier, just to see the guy"s face when he noticed the trustee"s signature on it. The guy said, "Are you sure you want Affirmed to win?" Warrington nodded, and walked away with his tickets, filled with both excitement and fear. He got as close to trackside as possible to watch his life either soar into the heavens or crash into the mud. It was now out of his hands as the horses a.s.sembled in the paddock and the race time buzz began to grow.
The way nineteen-year-old Warrington saw it, pretty much everything was out of his hands. He"d gone to Gilman as his mother had instructed and somehow managed to graduate. No high honors, but a diploma nonetheless. He"d been accepted at Villanova and was planning on declaring a major in economics. All of this made his mother quite happy. Outside his mother"s view, he lived a different life. A second life. He lived his stepfather, John Schapiro"s, life.
He read the Racing Form Racing Form daily and bet on horses with his stepfather whenever he could. He would regularly visit his real father in Palm Beach, where he learned what it"s like to live well, but he had come to terms with his stepfather. He was learning some interesting things. The man introduced him to the adrenaline of high risk, and it was as addictive as any narcotic. He had come to love taking chances, and the bigger the better. He really had no expectations of failure. He was absolutely positive he would do well, be rich, meet lots of beautiful women. He was nineteen. He had all the time in the world. daily and bet on horses with his stepfather whenever he could. He would regularly visit his real father in Palm Beach, where he learned what it"s like to live well, but he had come to terms with his stepfather. He was learning some interesting things. The man introduced him to the adrenaline of high risk, and it was as addictive as any narcotic. He had come to love taking chances, and the bigger the better. He really had no expectations of failure. He was absolutely positive he would do well, be rich, meet lots of beautiful women. He was nineteen. He had all the time in the world.
The gates crashed open and the Preakness was off. Believe It-who"d finished third behind Affirmed and Alydar at Kentucky-took the lead along the rail. Affirmed remained along the outside, running head-to-head with Believe It by the first turn. Warrington appreciated that moment. He knew Affirmed had been trained by veteran Luz Barrera and Believe It had been trained by Barrera"s son, Albert. At that moment, it was father against son.
An also-ran, Track Reward, pulled ahead in the first quarter mile, but then Affirmed took his place out front by the first half mile. Alydar was still well back. By 1:11, Affirmed led Noon Time Spender by a length, followed by Believe It and then, close behind, Alydar. And then Alydar began to move.
At the five-sixteenth pole, Alydar pulled into second place.
Warrington"s stomach began to roil and quail. Five thousand dollars he did not have. What would he do? What would happen when the check bounced and his stepfather got a call from the president of Pimlico? Would he be banned from the track? Would his stepfather? Would the police be summoned? What would they call the crime? Fraud? Deceit? A stupid teenager trick? Would he be kicked out of Tally Ho for good? Would Schapiro sit down that afternoon and rewrite his will?
Affirmed and Alydar were now neck and neck. Heading into the final stretch, Affirmed was in front in the middle with Believe It coming on strong at the rail, and Alydar pulling up fast on the outside. The jockey riding Alydar began hitting his horse with the whip in is left hand, then switched to his right to slap furiously away. In the upper stretch, from where Warrington was sitting, it was tough to see which horse was out front.
Then it was over, and Warrington was leaping into the air, howling like a dog, ecstatic. Affirmed by a neck. A neck! Alydar placed. Just as Warrington had hoped and prayed.
"The race was unbelievable. The turns are going up and down, up and down. If Alydar had won, I"m out. I collected $15,000. I took $5,000 of the winnings, went over to the window and got my check back and ripped it up."
He stepped back outside and looked up at the cupola to see the painter going to work, coloring pink and black on the weather vane that glinted in the sun. Pink and black were now Warrington"s favorite colors. He looked at the $10,000 in his nineteen-year-old hands. He couldn"t wait to tell his stepfather what he"d done. He would appreciate the temerity, the fearlessness of such a crazy stunt. Turning $5,000 he did not have into $10,000-now that that was the difference between recklessness and confidence. was the difference between recklessness and confidence.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
Now that she was dead, Cary suddenly realized he"d spent a lot of years talking to psychiatrists about his mother.
He"d seen one when he was just eleven, on orders from his mother, and then after he got out of college he"d begun formal a.n.a.lysis. He spent hours with the guy, trying to figure out why his childhood seemed more complicated than everyone else"s. His running theme was that he was basically a good guy who was constantly foiled by external forces. He learned all the phrases. Choices weren"t choices. There was no right and wrong. There were the "methodologies." The "methodologies" involving his mother had taken up quite a bit of time.
Of course they had. Was there anything more complicated than the relationship between a mother and son when there was no father in the picture? His stepfather the doctor didn"t count. The real force in his life, the real mystery, was clearly his mother. At one time she was a model, but when a real estate developer came along with the promise of material comfort and security, she got married instead. That"s where it got complicated.
When Cary was nine years old, a woman he"d never met before showed up at the Cimino family"s comfortable little home in suburban Oyster Bay, Long Island. She claimed to be the former wife of his father. This was news to Cary. It was also news that his brother and sister weren"t really his brother and sister. They were stepsiblings. His only sibling by blood was his sister Andrea. The woman wanted custody of her her children. Cary"s father said no, and an ugly dispute migrated to the courts. Stress levels inside the Cimino homestead elevated. Then on a weekend afternoon when Cary was home, his father was standing in the kitchen when he suddenly collapsed on the floor. He had had a heart attack. He was dead. children. Cary"s father said no, and an ugly dispute migrated to the courts. Stress levels inside the Cimino homestead elevated. Then on a weekend afternoon when Cary was home, his father was standing in the kitchen when he suddenly collapsed on the floor. He had had a heart attack. He was dead.
Within days the children Cary had believed all his life were his brother and sister went away to live with their real mother, taking most of their deceased father"s a.s.sets with them. This left nine-year-old Cary alone with his mother, a woman who"d never held a real job, and his little sister, Andrea, who was by now seven years old and confused about the sudden changes unfolding around her. They still had the nice Long Island house, but now they had no income save government benefits stemming from Cary"s father"s demise. They needed to change their way of living. Cary"s mother was not prepared for this.
"I had a unique childhood. I would say that since my father"s death, my mother was never the same. My mother had a very difficult time as a young widow left with debts. She lost what she knew. And I"m saying this in hindsight. It must have been so difficult for her. Just my sister Andrea and I, and it was just us left alone for an extended period of time when my mother was hospitalized."
Cary was too young to know precisely why his mother went away to a hospital, but he was quite aware that he and his sister were now all alone in their big old Oyster Bay house, a nine-year-old in charge of a seven-year old.
"We were left alone to care and feed one another," Andrea remembered. "Cary would go to the hospital and get our mother to sign the checks and then mail them out. I remember on three separate occasions hiding out and not answering the door. We knew it was some kind of social services and they might take us away and separate the two of us. I recall my mother telling me never to let them separate the two of you."
How many people on Sutton Place went through that that? Cary was proud of the fact that he had de facto raised his younger sister by himself. They pretended as if nothing had happened. The two children stayed home alone in Oyster Bay, dressing themselves, making themselves breakfast, taking the bus to school each day, coming home and doing it all again. This went on for months. Whether the bus driver ever noticed that the Cimino kids" mother never seemed to come to the door is not known. When social service agencies showed up, the kids would hide and eventually the agency people would go away. The outside world had no idea what was going on.
"There was a lack of any supervision," Cary remembered. "We lived in an affluent neighborhood and the authorities really didn"t bother us. I dressed Andrea every day and Andrea and I went to school every day."
Finally his mother felt well enough to come home, but not well enough to behave like a mother: "When my mother came out of the hospital, she signed checks and I became my mother"s confidant, the male role model in the house. I helped facilitate paying bills. I filled out checks, my mother signed them. We mailed them."
Just before Cary turned thirteen, his world once again changed radically. This time his mother met a doctor she decided she"d marry. Under most circ.u.mstances, this might seem to be a positive development. The doctor was wealthy and lived in a nice house in a suburb north of New York City. Not quite. The doctor had four children of his own, and none of the four wanted anything to do with Cary or Andrea. Here was Cary, turning thirteen and moving from Long Island, away from his childhood friends, to the new and foreign suburb of Suffern. The four new kids who hated him were supposed to be his new brothers and sister. This was not something he would have wished for, but it was to be. And naturally, it got worse.
The doctor had a rule for all his kids: no TV before 6 p.m. One afternoon Cary"s mother came home to see the doctor"s oldest son, a teenager, watching TV before six. She told him to turn it off. He refused. A verbal exchange ensued and escalated. The teenaged kid pushed Cary"s mother across the room and she fell. She broke her wrist. When the doctor learned of this, he did nothing about it. Divorce number two followed within months.
Again Cary, his sister and his mother were on their own. This time the financial pressures increased. Now they were forced to move into a lesser subdivision in Rockland County, next to Suffern. This meant Cary would see his former stepsiblings-including the one who"d a.s.saulted his mother-in the hallways of Suffern High School pretty much every day. He would say nothing; they would say nothing. It was as if they had never known one another. For Cary, now living in reduced circ.u.mstances, humiliation became a daily event.
Once again his mother was searching for a means of support, but now she was forty years old. She found what she believed was the solution by getting pregnant and allowing the twenty-four-year-old drug-abusing father to move in with her family. The new baby was a girl named Erin, and Cary didn"t get to know her. He was focused on one plan-getting away from this family as fast as possible.
"I left the house in 1978. I didn"t speak to my mother for several years. I actually took it as a breath of air to what was going on in the household. I was able to attend college by three or four methodologies. I received Social Security checks and Veterans checks because I was considered an orphan, and I used those monthly deposits. I received financial aid and I received some academic scholarships."
With a little help from the government, Cary enrolled at Boston University and majored in biology. He declared himself pre-med. Boston University was a liberating experience. He was away from the burden of family for the first time in his life, and BU in the late 1970s was a fun place to be. There were keg parties at the high-rise dorms on Commonwealth Avenue every weekend. There was all-night disco at Lucifer in Kenmore Square and an expanding punk scene at the Rat across the Square. Boston was paradise.
In college, Cary learned quickly that money impressed people. A lot of his fellow students came from wealthy Long Island families and he could talk that talk, too. With women, he started making a point of mentioning that he was pre-med. Saying you were a biology major didn"t cut it. Discussing endoplasmic reticulum and photosynthesis wouldn"t get you laid. The fact that he might one day be a doctor got the attention of certain women right away. In this way Cary decided money was a powerful aphrodisiac.
In fact, Cary was coming to believe that money was the defining characteristic of people. You either had it or you didn"t, and if you had it, more people wanted to be around you. If you didn"t have it, n.o.body wanted to be around you. It was as simple as that. Unfortunately for Cary, he didn"t really have it quite yet. He was telling everyone he met he would one day be a doctor, but the money wasn"t there to turn a boast into reality. He was spending so much time scrounging for cash just to pay his rent and phone bills and Boston University"s backbreaking tuition, he didn"t have time enough to complete the arduous tasks necessary to get into medical school. Now that was hard work. As graduation neared, Cary quietly dropped the medical school scheme and focused on simply getting out in one piece. In June 1982, Cary Cimino graduated Boston University and stepped into the real world, his plans for a career in medicine a childhood fantasy abandoned.
Money was what he needed, so he returned to the source-New York City. He had loans to pay off. He had people to impress. He had family to help.
Returning to New York was a complex matter. While he was far away at BU, his mother and sister had visited only once. He had pretty much pretended they didn"t exist. Now that he was back in New York, just a few miles from Rockland County, he realized he"d have to accept the fact that they existed. And when he returned after four years away, he realized they were barely existing.
His mother and sister were having a tough time. Her live-in boyfriend, fifteen years her junior, was a nightmare. He was addicted to drugs and rarely around. She was trying to raise a baby and enter the workforce for the first time in her life. Cary"s sister, Andrea, had also become involved with drugs and was not pleasant to be around. Cary believed that once again external forces everywhere were conspiring against him. He"d tried to escape at college but returned to find that nothing substantive had changed. His family was still his family.
He went to work as a commodity broker"s a.s.sistant, got his license and began working all the time. The money was spectacular, but some always went to his mother and two sisters. There was never enough, and what did he get in return? The way Cary sometimes saw it, his mother had abandoned him and his sister when his father died. She"d chosen to do that. She let them fend for themselves while others took care of her at the hospital. And as the years pa.s.sed, she continued to steal his childhood even after she came home, relying on Cary to deal with financial issues and ultimately fighting with him over money. When he was a senior in high school, she"d argued with him about Social Security and Veterans benefits he was receiving because of his father, demanding that she get a share of the money every month. Once he"d gone off to college, he"d practically had no contact with her.
But after he came back to New York and started making it on Wall Street, for some reason-he wasn"t quite sure why-he changed his mind. He began supporting his mother, her youngest daughter, his half-sister, Erin, and his blood sister, Andrea, in a big way. He sent them money, bought them cars, flew them around the country on vacations. Was it guilt? Did he blame himself for their troubles? Although he was seeing a psychologist, he tried not to think about it. Instead, he wrote checks. It was a lot easier. He had figured out that money was important to his mother. She knew what he knew.
Money was what made you somebody in this nasty world.
The psychiatrists had much to say about Cary and his money, sometimes dropping into vague language that removed personal choice from the picture.
One wrote, "Earning large sums of money became an integral part of his intra-psychic reparative defense mechanism."
Translation: Cary used money to mask the fact that he couldn"t relate to people.
They called this "extravagance." They listed all the things he did with his money: "He lived a lavish lifestyle, taking luxury vacations, driving expensive cars, and having brief romantic involvements with scores of women . . . He has few interests outside of maintaining a facade that will impress others with how fit or successful he is, e.g. working out in a gym to appear physically in good shape, wearing expensive clothes, sporting a healthy tan, and so on. He is a devotee of tanning salons."
Most importantly, they made it clear that no matter how much Cary collected each week and how much time he spent in a tanning booth, it wasn"t working. One claimed Cary "could never trust anyone in an intimate relationship" and noted he "has no long-term close friendships."
They had plenty to say about where this all started, and nearly every one of them attributed some of the blame to his mother. They noted how she had forced him to a.s.sume an adult role at a tender age, even after she"d returned home from the hospital: "He never again regained the parental supervision and nurturance that he had known in the past. He was his mother"s confidant, baby sitter and general factotum. He was forced to a.s.sume a facade of false bravado and maturity while remaining insecure and inadequate beneath the veneer he cultivated.
"He was like a frightened little boy masquerading as a grown-up."
By 1989, the "frightened little boy" had had enough of psychiatrists. He stopped seeing the psychiatrist he"d been seeing regularly for five years. Now, two years later, his mother was dead.
She had died slowly, of many cancers, at the young age of fifty-two, wasting away on morphine down in soulless Florida, unable to get out of bed for months now. It was not a surprise, but it certainly hurt. It should have inspired in him a sudden urge to reexamine the past. What could she have done differently? What could he have done differently? Why is life so sad? Unfortunately for Cary there wasn"t time for any of that.
His mother"s death was not just about the past. It was also about the future, and her name was Erin.
Cary and Andrea were well aware that their bedridden mother had been trying to raise Erin all by herself down in Florida. It wasn"t working out. The teenager had become a wild child whom Cary and Andrea hardly knew. Now she was about to enter their lives in a big way. They were responsible for her, by law and by agreement. Cary and Andrea were about to become parents.
Life for the devoted bachelor and his party girl sister was over. Cary had not seen this one coming.
The day Cary and Andrea became parents by default, Erin was a teenager who did what she wanted and listened to no one. Her father had long ago disappeared, and Cary"s mother had been bedridden. Cary remembered, "My mother at the time was living in Florida. I was living, obviously, in New York, and Erin had absolutely no supervision. My mother, the last year of her life, was bedridden and lived on morphine. Erin was out of control. There was no, G.o.d forgive me for describing my little sister that way, but there was no supervision at all. My mother was incapable of even getting out of bed."
This was not going to be easy.
As Cary and Andrea flew down to Florida for the funeral, Cary admitted he didn"t really know Erin at all. When she was two, he"d headed off to college and hadn"t come back. A simple way to put it was this: "I was thirty-one. Erin was thirteen years old."
How would Cary fit that into his Wall Street cowboy lifestyle? It didn"t seem possible. Were his trips to Aspen over? Was that it for the barhopping and the model hunting? Would the hours spent in the tanning booth now have to be spent going over high school geometry homework? He couldn"t even remember half of that nonsense. Cary Cimino-Dad. It just didn"t ring true.
1994.
When friends asked Cary what he thought about Wall Street, he always answered in plain English: "You didn"t go to Wall Street to become a rabbi or a priest, all right? You went to Wall Street to make money." When he was ultimately asked why he started taking under-the-table commissions in cash, he relied on the argle-bargle he"d picked up hanging around with psychiatrists: "I subverted a methodology."
In the three years since his mother"s death, Cary had decided that "subverting a methodology" was the only way to keep ahead of the wolf pack. The strains were enormous. Cary was paying for everything and everyone. He supported both his sisters, and he was back in a top-of-the-line apartment on the Upper East Side. The Aspen vacations, the Hamptons rental, the Mercedes, even the tanning salon visits cut into the net in a big way. There was tremendous pressure all the time, and to make that work, each day Cary looked for more money than he had earned the day before.
"I"m spending huge sums of money at this point. It"s a lifestyle, a sybaritic lifestyle. Trips to Aspen two, three weeks at a time, trips to St. Bart"s, trips to St. Tropez, trips to Paris, rental houses in the Hamptons, $10,000 a month for a year. Plus putting my sister Erin through high school and college. Buying my sisters automobiles. Every need that my sisters had-from medical to clothing to housing to education to vacations-I provided. My sister and I, to remind you, were bringing up a child. Erin was thirteen to twenty-one during this time, and I took the financial responsibility."